When a photolithography is performed in manufacturing a semiconductor device, a series of processes are sequentially carried out to form a predetermined resist pattern on a semiconductor wafer as a substrate to be processed. That is, there are performed, for example: a resist coating process for applying a resist liquid on the wafer to form thereon a resist film; an exposure process for exposing the resist film with a predetermined pattern; a heating process (post-exposure baking) for accelerating a chemical reaction in the resist film after exposure; and a developing process for developing the exposed resist film.
Process recipes respectively corresponding to the above series of processes are previously determined for every process lot of the wafer. The process recipe is data that define, in detail, conditions of a process to be performed to the wafer in each process. FIG. 9 shows an example of the process recipe. FIG. 9 is an example used in an apparatus for performing a resist coating process to a wafer by a spin-coating method by means of a spinner (substrate rotating unit). As shown in the process recipe 200, it defines a process period; a rotational speed and an acceleration of the spinner; a dispense specification for specifying distribution of a process liquid; and a position and an operational speed of an (robot) arm, for each of the process steps constituting the resist coating process.
Plural kinds of such process recipes are prepared for each process (resist coating process, developing process, etc.). As shown in FIG. 10, these process recipes are previously stored as a process recipe group (process recipe data group) 15 in storage means 201 such as a hard disc drive. When a resist coating and developing apparatus 202 operates, a desired process recipe is selected out of the process recipe group 15 by the operator, and a recipe execution program 16 is executed by a host computer 203 to operate the resist coating and developing apparatus 202 according to the selected process recipe. As shown in FIG. 11, upon execution of the recipe execution program 16, process recipes 18, which have been selected out of the process recipe group 15, are read out as execution recipes on a working memory 19 to be used in a program.
JP2001-345241A describes a substrate processing system that performs a photolithography according to a process recipe.
As shown in FIG. 11, the process recipe group 15 includes plural kinds of process recipes that are prepared for each kind of the processes. That is, a process recipe is selected out of the plurality of process recipes for each kind of the processes. Thus, the number of combinations of the process recipes capable of being executed in the overall photolithography process is enormous.
However, it is actually difficult to verify an operation of the recipe execution program 16 for all the vast number of combinations of the process recipes. Thus, a recipe execution program that was not fully verified is often used as a completed product temporarily.
When the substrate is subjected to a process of a combination of the process recipes for which an operation of the recipe execution program 16 is not verified, there may be a case in which a hardware does not work to conform to the recipes, because the program modules for respectively executing the successive process recipes cannot cooperate well with each other.
Even when such a failure occurs, it is often the case that the process continues while no attention is given to the failure, and a bug of the program is revealed from defective treatment of wafers after all the wafer-processing steps have been completed. Also in this case, it is significantly difficult to manually detect the bug of the program (debug operation), since there are too many processes in the program because of the complicated recipes. Accordingly, the debug operation of the recipe execution program 16 requires a long period of time, and thus the completeness of the program can not be improved in a short period of time.